Since Brexit, major international banks have been playing a game of cat and mouse with their supervisor, the European Central Bank (ECB). Since the United Kingdom is no longer part of the single European market, it has lost, among other things, the famous “financial passport”, which allowed it to sell financial products from London throughout the European Union (EU). Henceforth, this work must be carried out from one of the countries of the Union.
This is why institutions like JP Morgan or Bank of America have significantly developed their presence in Paris, for example. Or in 2021, nearly 2,000 bankers were earning more than 1 million euros within 20-7, which is 41% higher than the previous year.
From the beginning, however, banks have done everything to limit as much as possible the number of positions they outsource. According to calculations by the firm EY, barely ten thousand jobs were directly transferred from London to other European capitals.
Undeterred, the ECB insists that the work is actually carried out on EU soil, with high-level leaders present on site. In May 2020, seven months before the United Kingdom’s effective exit from the single market, she put her fist on the table, launching a major assessment of the necessary transfers, bank by bank, business by business. In November 2023, it published that it had identified 56 brokerage teams that must either be based entirely in the EU or “With a significant increase in local capabilities”. “ECB will not tolerate empty shells”she recalled.
Unfair dismissal
The latest picture of this showdown was revealed by Financial Times, Sunday February 18. According to the British financial daily, Morgan Stanley tried to deceive the ECB. American Bank gave the title of “loan brokerage manager” to an employee based in Frankfurt (Germany), who today claims that is not his real job and has no managerial functions.
The information became public because the banker in question – whose name has not been released – was fired by Morgan Stanley and went to court for unfair dismissal. During the hearing, he confirmed that American Bank asked him not to use this title when he was hired in April 2021 (for a salary of 375,000 euros, plus bonus). According to his superiors, this work “Exists only on paper” And the ECB was made to give the impression that a high-ranking executive was present. His real role was brokering bad debts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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